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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5717391" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>Even GMing Rolemaster - in which changes in the numbers really <em>do</em> correspond to changes in the fiction - I've always tried, in my games, to make "advancement" within the fiction more significant than numerical advancement.</p><p></p><p>In 4e, I can't see any other way of doing it. Compare, for example, the MM stats of a human guard to those of a drow warrior.</p><p></p><p>The drow warrior (+14 vs AC) hits the human guard's AC of 18 on a 4 or better. On the two rounds that the guard is subject to Darkfire, the combat advantage means the drow hits on a 2. Each hit deals 8.5 points of damage, +7 with combat advantage, and has a 9/10 chance of inlicting drow poison, giving the guard -2 to hit. Two rounds of combat advantage will deliver about 29 hp damage, leaving the guard with 18 hp. Two or three more rounds without combat advantage will whittle those away.</p><p></p><p>In that time, the guard will deliver, on average, about 3 hp per round (2 hp per round while suffering -2 to hit), meaning that the drow loses somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10 or so of its 83 hp. Confronted by two guards, the drow could expect to beat both of them and take around 30 hp or so of damage. To have a good chance of beating the drow would, I think, require 4 or more guards able to attack at once. For a single guard to beat the drow it would have to survive more than 20 rounds in combat. This would require the drow to miss it (a 3/20 likelihood) at least 10 times, or at least every second round. I think the odds of that are (20 C 10) times 3 to the 10 divided by 20 to the 10. I make that to be odds of around one in 1000 - extremely unlikely!</p><p></p><p>And I just don't see generic drow as being that good - winning against a single human guard more than 90 times in 100! The human guard is hardly a slouch, after all, having a reasonable chance of holding his own against 5 2nd level human rabble.</p><p></p><p>The alternative is to do as I do, and treat the numbers overwhelmingly as a tool for encounter design - which, in combination with the published monsters, also produces a rough default storyline, of starting with goblins and ending with Orcus.</p><p></p><p>That default storyline also plays another role, I think, which is relevant to this post from upthread:</p><p></p><p></p><p>Although sliding down a staircase has a scaling DC, although it is the same task, if the game is following the default storyline in some rough fashion then the 1st level staircase is likely to be in an inn, and the 21st level staircase is likely to be in an ancient tower on the Feywild or in the Elemental Chaos. Although these different settings are in some sense merely colour, I think that colour goes a long way to making the scaling, and the general looseness of fit between mechanics and fiction, seem acceptable rather than misleading.</p><p></p><p>More bluntly: we don't have any precise mechanical measure of how much tougher a drow warrior is then a human guard, or how much more challenging a slide down an eladrin than a human staircase, but we know both are somewhat tougher/more challenging, and require more committed and powerful heroes to face up to them, and the changes in the number on my character sheet show that I'm a more committed and powerful hero!</p><p></p><p>And as far as the actual mechanical play goes, as long as the GM is reasonably upfront about the DCs of various things, the players can make their own calculations and take their own chances!</p><p></p><p>(Now suppose that you had the PC advance from 2nd to 3rd level - thus increasing the default DCs but not improving their skills - and they came back to the same inn and tried to surf a shield down the same staircase. Would I advocate making the DC higher without some clear ingame fictional explanation? No. But that is a corner case of a sort that as best I can recall has never come up for me in 3 years of GMing the game.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 5717391, member: 42582"] Even GMing Rolemaster - in which changes in the numbers really [I]do[/I] correspond to changes in the fiction - I've always tried, in my games, to make "advancement" within the fiction more significant than numerical advancement. In 4e, I can't see any other way of doing it. Compare, for example, the MM stats of a human guard to those of a drow warrior. The drow warrior (+14 vs AC) hits the human guard's AC of 18 on a 4 or better. On the two rounds that the guard is subject to Darkfire, the combat advantage means the drow hits on a 2. Each hit deals 8.5 points of damage, +7 with combat advantage, and has a 9/10 chance of inlicting drow poison, giving the guard -2 to hit. Two rounds of combat advantage will deliver about 29 hp damage, leaving the guard with 18 hp. Two or three more rounds without combat advantage will whittle those away. In that time, the guard will deliver, on average, about 3 hp per round (2 hp per round while suffering -2 to hit), meaning that the drow loses somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10 or so of its 83 hp. Confronted by two guards, the drow could expect to beat both of them and take around 30 hp or so of damage. To have a good chance of beating the drow would, I think, require 4 or more guards able to attack at once. For a single guard to beat the drow it would have to survive more than 20 rounds in combat. This would require the drow to miss it (a 3/20 likelihood) at least 10 times, or at least every second round. I think the odds of that are (20 C 10) times 3 to the 10 divided by 20 to the 10. I make that to be odds of around one in 1000 - extremely unlikely! And I just don't see generic drow as being that good - winning against a single human guard more than 90 times in 100! The human guard is hardly a slouch, after all, having a reasonable chance of holding his own against 5 2nd level human rabble. The alternative is to do as I do, and treat the numbers overwhelmingly as a tool for encounter design - which, in combination with the published monsters, also produces a rough default storyline, of starting with goblins and ending with Orcus. That default storyline also plays another role, I think, which is relevant to this post from upthread: Although sliding down a staircase has a scaling DC, although it is the same task, if the game is following the default storyline in some rough fashion then the 1st level staircase is likely to be in an inn, and the 21st level staircase is likely to be in an ancient tower on the Feywild or in the Elemental Chaos. Although these different settings are in some sense merely colour, I think that colour goes a long way to making the scaling, and the general looseness of fit between mechanics and fiction, seem acceptable rather than misleading. More bluntly: we don't have any precise mechanical measure of how much tougher a drow warrior is then a human guard, or how much more challenging a slide down an eladrin than a human staircase, but we know both are somewhat tougher/more challenging, and require more committed and powerful heroes to face up to them, and the changes in the number on my character sheet show that I'm a more committed and powerful hero! And as far as the actual mechanical play goes, as long as the GM is reasonably upfront about the DCs of various things, the players can make their own calculations and take their own chances! (Now suppose that you had the PC advance from 2nd to 3rd level - thus increasing the default DCs but not improving their skills - and they came back to the same inn and tried to surf a shield down the same staircase. Would I advocate making the DC higher without some clear ingame fictional explanation? No. But that is a corner case of a sort that as best I can recall has never come up for me in 3 years of GMing the game.) [/QUOTE]
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